The Lifelook Book Series: under construction
The Architecture of an Examined Life
The essays in Attending the Days live in the open field where questions breathe and daily moments reveal their quiet meaning. The books gather that same inquiry into form. Each volume distills those reflections into a more deliberate conversation about how we live, what we value, and how consciousness meets the world through us.
If the essays are improvisations, the books are the composed scores – built from the similar melody, guided by the same principles.
These books take their time, unfolding in a carefully layered series that follows their own rhythm – their eigenzeit, (German for “own time” or “self-time”): the time inherent to a process. It’s the rhythm through which life remembers its own way and offers us the pause to response within it. Bread must rise (unless unleavened, of course), relationships must ripen, water finds its course, even a simple chore takes the time it needs to be done well. Every act of becoming carries its natural pace; the slow, sometimes improvised tempo of understanding that deepens through participation and reveals the world as it recollects itself in us. Rush a process beyond its eigenzeit, and you lose what makes it whole.
To live within our eigenzeit is to move in rhythm with time itself – momentum held with patience, the way life remembers its own coherence. Time, when lived with attention, becomes remembrance in motion. It provides the breathing room to choose our responses instead of controlling our outcomes; it allows love its space to inspire inner confidence we take into the world. We can’t force insight into bloom; we can only tend the soil and nurture its rhythm as it reveals itself. This is true of reading, too. True of learning. True of living.
The Lifelook series embraces that rhythm: the balance of patience in motion, allowing things their time while moving in steady participation with life’s unfolding. It's the nothingness of potential steadily at work. Also, I work full-time and try to show up for my family of four (plus two dogs). So the time to do these things stretches naturally, as most meaningful things do.
The ideas for these books began when I recognized a philosophy quietly guiding my choices, one I'd lived yet never named. Then one night, during bedtime reading, my six-year-old son asked, "Dad, what's our book?"
He wasn’t asking about bedtime stories. He meant our book – the kind people live by. We don’t have one of those, at least not in the traditional sense. Our family holds space for curiosity before belief, for wonder before doctrine. We intentionally allow space through casual exploration and exposure. We prioritize letting the young mind extend their imagination and wonderment before the adults barge into the room and lay out the criteria for beliefs. His question stirred something ancient and familiar: the need to shape meaning without closing its doors.
So I began to write Lifelook: a gentle, dynamic presencing that returns us to our becoming. My way of holding the world in view that uncovers harmony inside its tensions. Heraclitus captured it millennia ago: the strings of a lyre pulled in opposite directions to make music, the bow drawn taut to send an arrow in flight. Without tension, no song. Without patience, no motion. Without death, no life. You get the gist.
Each volume accompanies you on a deepening exploration toward meaningful insight, mindful presence, and a more harmonious relationship with change.
The books offer structured yet flexible space, encouraging us to train our awareness, engage with timeless ideas, and embody values attuned with our own path. Each stands complete on its own and gracefully enhances the others.
The series integrates ancient traditions, contemporary science, genuine lived experience, and a gentle touch of humor. If you'd like to know when the first volume is ready—or gently nudge me forward—you can reach out (isaiah.behnke@gmail.com) or revisit occasionally. Expect a quietly thoughtful launch.
The Lifelook Series
Why Three Books?
Because an examined life deserves room to breathe. And, well, good things come in three, right?
Our lifelook extends as all living things do: from spark into form, through reflection into lived expression. It moves with its own tempo of becoming – its eigenzeit, the time proper to its unfolding. You can’t rush understanding any more than you can hurry dough to rise or that same bread to bake. Processes take the time they need to become themselves. Like water finding its path, we come to recognize our flow.
Patience, though, is never passivity. Still, waiting (and space) is only half the rhythm. The accompanying opposite asks us to step in and move while the current moves. We don't need to wait for some sufficient mass of readiness to form around our inertia. You'll see it when you feel it, and you'll feel it when the waters of uncertainty rush around you. That's your cue to start paddling.
Soft urgency in practice: patience alive in motion.
- First, let's set up some scaffold. Clarify our ways of becoming through flexible structure and grounded presence.
- Next, we engage enduring philosophical themes. Why? Because rich, malleable materials ensure our choices hold depth and resonance that tend toward growth, further shaping our genuine way of being.
- Finally, we embody our values, allowing understanding to form through daily participation and care.
Together, these books invite you into an evolving exploration of what it means to live fully, intentionally, and genuinely in rhythm with your own lifelook unfolding in its organic eigenzeit.
Book 1 | Lifelook: The Scaffold
Question your foundation. Craft your framework.
We need steady ground beneath our feet while we build toward something meaningful. And foundations form in their own eigenzeit – their time to settle, breathe, and bear weight. We can’t hurry a structure into stability any more than you can rush bread to toast or a tree to root. The time it takes is the process; life emerges in the becoming.
The first book provides fodder for the foundation and the materials for the framework: a scaffold we can trust to hold our weight as we build your inner temple. Here, we explore three practical principles that help us train our awareness as we engage with timeless ideas. It's the architecture of how we see, how we show up, and how we shape our daily choices with integrity and presence.
These three principles form the inner architecture of Lifelook – a rhythm of living awareness that moves through every page and practice.
Three Principles of Living Process
- Perception (enactive contact): the pulse of awareness in motion that frames experience – awareness discovering itself through touch, sound, and noticing. It's our participatory encounter that shapes the ongoing act through which world and psyche discover one another. What we notice—and, more importantly, how we notice—defines the quality of our encounter with reality; it marks the difference between seeing the world and meeting it.
We move our eyes, turn our head, lean into sound and texture. Every act of noticing is an exploration, an embodied question to which the world responds by appearing. Perception always partial, yet direct – our most immediate encounter with reality. Through perception, life feels itself through us; awareness recognizes its own patterning in motion.
Perception works as a skill. We probe, the world answers, and the scene takes shape through that exchange. What we can do shapes what we can perceive; aims and abilities reveal different edges of the same scene. What changes if I move? Then move.
- Aware Action (embodied participation): the deep movement that carries awareness into form – the gesture that turns seeing and meeting into participation. Each act arises as a dialogue between being and doing, presence and service. Through this rhythm, meaning becomes lived rather than sought, experienced as the felt harmony between inner stillness and outer motion.
Every choice receives and extends perception through us into the world, expressing what we understand, however imperfectly, through the texture of our living. Aware Action moves without clinging, reaches with yielding, and rests within its own return. It lets perception breathe and gives shape to what insight begins: the yin and yang of life reconnecting with one another through us.
Through Aware Action, we participate in the experience of meaning itself, where being allows doing, and doing reinforces being in the spiral of becoming.
- Attunement (renews coherence): our self-correcting return that tunes perception and action to what matters most – the listening that keeps life in key with integrity and meaning. Attunement opens both inward and outward at once, harmonizing the inner chord of awareness with the larger music of existence. It draws us into our values and opens us to fuller participation with what seeks to live through us. It restores the rhythm that perception and action continuously generate, guiding us back into resonance with nature's values and our own unfolding way.
The Living Circuit
Perception explores. Action expresses. Attunement restores. Together they form a living circuit, an embodied process through which consciousness realizes itself through relationship, moment by moment.
These principles generate the flow we inhabit; the contours that support everything we hang our meaning on. When we move with them, understanding ripens at its natural pace. Tension transforms into flexible structure. Meaning reveals itself through movement. This is the architecture of becoming.
And as we live within this rhythm—perceiving, acting, and attuning—we begin to re-sense something deeper stirring beneath experience. The very movement where awareness and action hum with a quieter order. The essence of time is flow: eigenzeit gives the process its pace; participation gives it voice. Together, they reveal the music beneath the motion, the deeper intelligence of nature remembering itself through us.
Beautiful as they may sound, these are not separate ideals waiting to be applied, but undercurrents already at work in all living systems. They are the tones of being, the steady frequencies of relationship that shape existence from within. When we flow with them, we rejoin meaning; the fodder to generate meaning already lives within us.
Nature’s Values: The Undercurrents
When we live through these principles, we begin to sense the deeper movements shaping both nature and psyche – currents that echo through everything that lives:
- Resonance: existence vibrating in relationship, where patterns respond to patterns and meaning arises in the betweenness.
- Harmony: the confluence of opposites where difference generates unity through movement, the way day listens into night.
- Generosity: nature’s intrinsic givingness: potential offered without demand, the quiet abundance that sustains becoming.
Nature's living values integrate the classical ideals: Truth lives as Resonance felt; Beauty lives as Harmony unveiled; Goodness lives as Generosity embodied.
In this book, we'll explore:
- How we shape our perception intentionally, finding clarity amid uncertainty.
- Ways to act with genuine awareness rather than automatic reaction.
- Practices that sustain attunement, guiding perception and action aligned with our deepest priorities.
Building, like living, takes its time – its eigenzeit. Rush the process and the walls crack; give some space, and our presence breathes. Pliable scaffold allows the space for the architecture of an examined life to flex as we grow.
If you’re ready to ground your philosophical practice in practical perspective, this is where you begin.
With our scaffold understood, we can explore deeper themes and arrange our values thoughtfully.
Status: actively in development and nearing completion.
Book 2 | Lifelook: Core Philosophical Themes
Gather your materials. Deepen your understanding.
Before decorating our sanctuary, first choose carefully the materials we’ll use. Philosophy, like building, depends on what we work with. Wood and stone reveal their grain only through time and attention. Understanding, too, takes its own eigenzeit.
With our scaffold in place, we turn to the philosophical themes that shape how we live and make meaning. These ideas refine perception and deepen participation, bringing us closer to home.
- Expand Consciousness – reexamine how we relate to awareness as the ground of all experience.
- Impermanence and Release – accepting transience as the gateway to presence. We can delight in life’s fleeting nature and discover the joy of letting go of nothing.
- Embrace the Absurd – discover courage and humor in existence's strange and wild paradox; meaning grows where certainty falters.
- Cultivate Your Way – grow from within rather than conform from without; intentionally develop your personal path, your wayless way.
- Hugging Mindfulness – return to awareness through compassion, play, and attention. We deepen our attentive presence through warmth and care. Yes, I'm talking about presencing.
These themes offer the refinement tools to strip away noise and sand our sharper edges to prepare our surfaces for beauty and use. Philosophy, when lived, doesn't deliver us from confusion, rather it provides us with rich material to rebuild, remodel, and reshape our inner space for deeper participation.
Through deliberate exploration and practice, we transform concepts into practical tools that help us craft meaning from life's complexities.
This volume will guide you to:
- Engage deeply with life’s inherent paradoxes and uncertainties.
- Integrate timeless wisdom and practical insights into your daily rhythm.
- Cultivate your own philosophical way of moving through the world.
This is the book for those drawn to the raw material of thought – the substance we use to make meaning. So if you seek the tools and materials to enrich and shape your lived experience, this one's for you.
Status: under development
Book 3 | Lifelook: Twelve Core Values
Furnish and rearrange your inner temple. Live your values.
With a scaffold to stand on and philosophy alive within, we turn toward embodiment.
This final volume explores twelve essential values that guide our choices and give shape to a meaningful life:
- Gratitude, Humility, Courage, Wonder and Curiosity
- Loving-Kindness, Humor, Reciprocity
- Compassion, Gentle Abiding, Agility
- Paradox, Wisdom
Each value unfurls through narrative vignettes, reflective essays, and grounded practices that invite you to embody meaningful daily living through the ordinary.
You’ll refine your lifelook – choosing, arranging, and rearranging your inner space as you live your values into being. The ones that resonate deeply and truthfully for you become your furniture for the long stay. Over time, the furniture rearranges itself, and you realize the room has changed with you. And you're still you.
Status: under development
On Time and Tending
Each of us bakes and flows at our own pace. Bread needs heat, water needs gravity, and understanding needs time. Your lifelook rises in its season and finds its way downstream, carried by eigenzeit – the time proper to becoming. It already knows its way; we’re simply learning to reconnect and move with it.
When we attend to the days with presence and care, we recover something older than effort — the quiet intelligence of process itself. The world remembers its way through us. The same current that shapes the river, grows the seed, and heals the wound moves through our own becoming. Eigenzeit gives us space to listen, to choose, and to act responsively within the flow. It invites participation without control: the freedom to respond without rushing what must unfold.
Our Way unfolds as we do. Through patience in motion, awareness keeps working – soft urgency steady in its becoming. When we honor the time proper to becoming, we recover understanding. With understanding we restore our rhythm with nature’s values: the grace of response over reaction, trust over aversion and resistance. We re-tune with the harmony that’s always been there, like water recalling the shape of its riverbed. Everything ripens in its own time, and so do we, tending gently toward our return.
Patience in motion. Awareness at work. Soft urgency, steady becoming.
Your Lifelook Awaits
Each book stands individually powerful. Together, they guide a meaningful life built with intention, reflection, and wisdom.
Join this ongoing conversation. Participate actively in your self-discovery. Shape your own lifelook.